Tough as Old Boots
by SiuanSedai
Summary: Yuffie's late home, and Sora begins to worry like a mother hen. Written for 100 situations on livejournal. Sora x Yuffie.


I wrote this for the 100situations livejournal challenge a while ago... enjoy :) Does anyone else find that when they upload something to the document manager, it repeats the first sentence? It's really getting on my nerves :S

**Prompt 002 - Back Alley**

"Have you seen Yuffie?" Sora asked. Aerith shook her head, her curls bouncing gently.

"Sorry Sora, but I haven't seen her for a few hours. She said she was going out, but not where to. I'm sure she's still somewhere in the town," Aerith said.

"Ok… well, I guess I'll go see if I can find her anywhere," Sora said.

"Sora?" Aerith called as he left. "Try the roof of the tavern. She hangs out up there sometimes." Sora nodded and left the house.

--

Yuffie wasn't on the pub roof. She wasn't in any of her usual hangouts either – not sitting on the bridge, not in the shop trying out swords, and she wasn't on the steps of the town hall.

Sora decided to give up looking. He still needed to talk to her, but it could wait until the evening. Yuffie didn't miss dinner, full stop. Except when Aerith insisted that Leon help out and do the cooking every once in a while, in which case Yuffie made her merry way down to the tavern and came out merrier. Everyone did that; Aerith was the only one of them nice enough to force herself to eat Leon's burnt offerings.

"Did you find her?" Aerith asked when Sora trudged back into the house.

"No, and I looked everywhere," he grumbled. Aerith laughed.

"She'll be back soon, it's getting late," she said. But Yuffie wasn't back soon. Sora listened to the big grandfather clock in the hallway tick, and every half an hour he thought that surely she'd be back before the next time it sounded.

"Do you think she's ok?" Aerith asked worriedly at 8.30. Dinner had been two hours before, and Leon hadn't seen Yuffie all day either

"I don't know… do you want me to go and look for her?" Sora asked. "She's probably fine, but…" he trailed off. Even Yuffie could have been hurt. Balance and poise only took you so far when you accepted stupid bets involving high fences, and Yuffie's luck so far had been good. Sora told himself off for being a worrying idiot – wasn't the 'mothering hen' act supposed to be _Aerith's_?

"Would you?" Aerith asked hopefully. "I'd ask Leon to go, but…" Sora snorted with laughter. The tall man had returned home in a fury, having been in the way of a badly-aimed spell from Merlin which had turned his hair bright blue. A steady stream of swearing could be heard from the bathroom as Leon tried, and failed, to prove that magic colours could be removed by copious amounts of shampoo.

--

Sora hadn't been able to find Yuffie anywhere. No one had seen her all day, and in the end he decided to go back to the house. She'd probably taken the train somewhere and missed the last one back, or something.

Sora was walking past a dark alley – the one that didn't lead anywhere, but somehow always managed to evade being filled in either by a building or by abandoned rubbish – when he heard music. Where it was coming from, he had no idea – it wasn't like there was a concert hall hidden down there, or anything – so he decided to go and look.

He almost missed it in the dark, but a tattered piece of cloth which had been stuck to the wall ever since he first came to Hollow Bastion was flapping in the breeze, unstuck on the left side. Behind it was a dark hole in the wall.

"Hello?" he asked, sticking his head in through the entrance to wherever it was. There was a surprised sound and the music stopped. Then the light was turned on – Sora winced at the brightness – and he saw Yuffie standing by an old piano.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, hands on her hips.

"I was looking for you. Aerith's worried," Sora told her. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, of course," Yuffie said. "Tell Aerith to stop worrying about me, she does it way too much." Sora noticed that her eyes were red, as if she'd been crying, and there was a dusty smudge on her cheek that could have come from wiping her face quickly with a dirty hand. And it certainly wasn't what you'd call fresh from a spring cleaning.

"Uh… are you sure? That tune you were playing… it was kind of, you know, melancholy," Sora said uncomfortably. Yuffie wasn't the type of girl to randomly burst into tears all over the place. She shrugged.

"I like it, so tough," she said.

"I didn't know you could play piano," Sora said. It was amazingly hard to find something to say to Yuffie, who was always so easy to talk to. Maybe that was partly because she was always cheerful, so he didn't need to worry about upsetting her by the most random things; most girls that Sora knew went into strange huffs now and then and would never explain what he'd said wrong. With Yuffie, she'd just whack him and forget it.

"I learnt back in my own world," Yuffie told him. "You know the guy who used to run the concert hall in Traverse Town? He used to let me use the piano there after the shows were finished as long as I… dispersed… the drunks who wanted to sleep inside the building."

"Can I stay and listen?" Sora asked.

"If you like," Yuffie said unconcernedly. Sora leant against the wall and watched her walk back to the light switch.

"Tell me you aren't afraid of the dark," Yuffie said when he started to ask why she'd plunged them both into pitch blackness. "I like to play in the dark, so deal with it." Sora laughed. No piano could stop Yuffie's utter Yuffieness blaring forth.

Then silence fell, and Sora heard Yuffie's quick intake of breath before she began to play. And then the poignant tones of the piano filled the grimy, darkened room and it was the type of music that made even the most insensitive gits like Sora – as Yuffie would put it – got lost in the melody of it.

"You stopped playing," Sora said. He didn't know how long he'd been standing there listening, but he felt a weird sense of disappointment now that the music was gone. "Er, Yuffie?"

He heard her move from her seat, but being a ninja warrior she managed to stand right in front of him without him realising until she was close enough for him to feel the warmth radiating from her.

"I'm a great warrior ninja, right?" Yuffie said quietly. It was a statement, but it required an answer.

"Sure, you're Yuffie Kisaragi. Tough as old boots," Sora said.

"Being tough doesn't make me not a girl, though," Yuffie reminded him.

"I never said you weren't a girl," Sora pointed out. It was hard to forget that she was a girl when she was standing so close to him that her breasts were pressed against his chest.

"Oh good… then you won't mind if I do this," Yuffie said, and kissed him. She pulled back quickly. "Unless you'd prefer Leon," she teased.

"Definitely not," Sora stated vehemently. "No way, not ever –"

"Sora?" Yuffie interrupted. "Shut up."


End file.
